Coincidence!

Guuzen!

Today was kind of surreal. I chatted online with someone I hadn't spoken to for over two decades. We were friends in junior high. Not best friends (my best friends at the time were the Pea Mommy and another girl who, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't really do computers), but we were most certainly friends, and I have only fond memories of her.

What was really neat was that she'd sent me part of a Facebook message in simple but grammatically correct Japanese, and I sent a message back to her in what I hope is comprehensible Mandarin, even though I don't know how to do the little accent marks for proper pinyin (alphabet notation for Mandarin, my friend is of Chinese descent). Apparently she'd started studying Japanese by listening to Podcasts in her car. I started doing something similar with Mandarin to put the time I spent driving around the prefecture for work stuff to good use. I thought it was interesting that we did the same thing with each other's mother tongues before we got back in touch with each other.